I've been using GTD for almost 3 years now, and although I've been on and off the wagon several times, on each iteration it gets better and more effective. And, just as the book predicts, each time I make an improvement in efficiency and organisation, I get more responsibility and work dumped on me.
Recently, due to some other factors at work, this has been taken to an extreme level. I'm working consistently 14-hour days, plus 8-hour days on Saturdays and Sundays. My calendar is blocked wall-to-wall with meetings from 8:00am to 6:00pm every day, up to a week in advance, and now people are just double-booking to see which meeting I turn up to. I get an average of 600 emails per day, and even after filtering for system-generated alert emails and such, it's still around 300 per day. At any one time I have about 100 active projects, about 4 of which are major strategic initiatives. And that's just my work life.
If this isn't GTD under extreme conditions, I don't know what is...
Recently, I've gone through another iteration of GTD detox, by listening to the audiobook version of the GTD book three times in a row, and I had an epiphany about GTD:
The only fundamental concept in GTD is to do all the thinking up-front.
All the rest of the book is just extra tips and tricks for managing the results of that thinking. You could almost leave all the rest of it out and still be effective if this one, all-encompassing rule is always followed. Of course, the other stuff is useful too, but this epiphany has led me to make some incremental, yet significant adjustments to my GTD system, to help me cope with the extreme conditions I am facing every day.
This is the first post in a series of posts I will be doing about the tricks and "ah-hah!" moments that are helping me survive. Here is a list of the posts so far:
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